The Behemoth launches indie-friendly QA lab and funding program

Battleblock Theater developer The Behemoth announced today that it's launching two new non-game projects aimed at supporting indie developers -- The Research Centaur game testing lab and the Gold Egg Project funding program. The Research Centaur is Behemoth's attempt to contract out its user testing and quality assurance teams at a rate that's affordable for smaller teams of independent developers. According to the Centaur website, the group is capable of working on PC, mobile and console games and has already worked with folks like Supergiant, Alientrap and Capybara Games. Capybara Games president Nathan Vella told Gamasutra that the Centaur outfit offers a useful service for independent developers who are self-publishing their games and are therefore bereft of publisher support when it comes to user testing. "Super Time Force on Xbox One is being self-published via the ID@Xbox program. As such, we were in a position where we needed to source our own external testing," Vella told Gamasutra via email. "The TRC team has been helping us navigate the dangerously stormy waters of testing for certification on a new platform, and it's been a great experience so far." The Behemoth is also publicly launching the Gold Egg Project, an ill-defined financial program that purports to help fund independent developers seeking to self-publish their games. The company has not disclosed its funding rates, its expectations for its partners or what criteria it uses to determine who will receive funding -- developers are asked not to directly request funding, but are encouraged to submit their games to public game competitions in the hopes of catching the attention of the Gold Egg Project. The project will only fund one game at a time, and the inaugural recipients were Tyler Glaiel and Jon Schubbe for their game Closure. More recently, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime developer Asteroid Base received some funding through the program. The details of that arrangement have not been disclosed. Gamasutra has reached out to The Behemoth and Asteroid Base for further comment on the program.